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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a